It’s official. As of July 2011, there are 191 airlines on Twitter, while only 179 airlines have loyalty programs. The first loyalty program came into existence 30 years ago, in the form of AAdvantage by American Airlines, while the first airlines on Twitter joined just 5o months ago: jetBlue and Delta in May 2007. And what a journey it has already been!

SimpliFlying is back with the Monthly Twitter Report (in partnership with Eezeer) for July 2011 in continuation with our coverage and analysis of the dynamic social media landscape for airlines.

A number of facts are immediately clear from this report:

Airlines are using Twitter more than ever before. The number of tweets increased by 51% from March 2011 to July 2011.

However, most of the tweets are being sent out by a small number of the airlines on Twitter. To be precise, 30 airlines account for 84% of the tweets, which is up from 26 providing 80% of the tweets in the May report.

Delta Air Lines still sends and receives the most number of tweets, which has been the trend since the first report. However, while the response rate to public tweets may seem like a paltry 20% of the tweets, we’ve confirmation from Delta Air Lines that when we include Direct Messages, the airline responds to over 50% of the messages!

Over a hundred airlines still don’t seem to have a strategy for Twitter, as only 82 out of the 191 airlines tweet actively

In South America, TAM Brazil is the most followed airline, with over 225,000 people following the airline’s tweets.

For more insights, check out the infographic and let us know what you thought about it. Is there something you agree with? Disagree? Are there any figures that you’d like to see in next month’s infographic? Tweet us @simpliflying and let us know. You can also view our previous Monthly Reports for June ’11 here and May ’11 here.

Shashank Nigam

Shashank Nigam is the CEO of SimpliFlying and a globally sought-after consultant, speaker and thought-leader on airline branding and customer engagement strategy. He is also the youngest winner of the Global Brand Leadership Award and has addressed senior aviation executives globally, from Chile to Canada and from Sydney to San Francisco.Shashank's perspectives have found their way into major media outlets, including CNN Travel, CNBC, MSNBC, Bloomberg UTV, Mashable and in leading publications like Airline Business, ATW, Aviation Week, and others.Shashank studied Information Systems Management and Business Management at Singapore Management University and Carnegie Mellon University. Hailing from India, he splits his time between Singapore and Vancouver, among other cities.